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Nightfly wrote:One of my personal PCs has a gun-sword inspired by one of the Pirates of the Caribbean video games.Score a good hit and a flintlock-styled pistol attached to the grip fires along the line of the sword Mine's rigged to autofire x2 rounds per appropriate hit

I also like knife fighting amidst gun-kata action

I remember the gunblade in Final Fantasy 8. It looked cool and that for a JRPG, but I thought it was rather a silly bit of imagination.

A couple years ago, I was paging through a magazine that had an article about some of the weirdest weapons in firearms history, and big as you pleeze, they had a bunch of pics of gunblades from the 18th or 19th century.

Not long after that, on a trip to toronto, I was in the ROM and they actually had some on exhibit. One looked almost exactly like Squall's blade in the game, just a hell of a lot smaller.

"You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,And now and then stab, as occasion serves."

Strict31 wrote:There was this muthafucka I played with...No matter what you did, no matter how you smacked him down, no matter how you rewarded him, he was always scheming for moremoremore. He was constantly drifting out of character to attain that moremoremore.

So, I finally said, "Fuck it", and ran a game where his character was finally tailor made for his playing style. It ended up being the most hilarious game I've ever played, and ended up with his character butt-ass nekkid, covered in the blood and intestines of a fat lady (ya hadda be there...), hiding in the bushes with a garden hose in one hand as the other players discovered him.

LOL

Just as I was reading your post I was seeing Bruce Campbell on tv - I couldn't help but picture Campbell as the one hiding in them bushes

Started gaming when I was about 8 or 9. In grade school and high school, we focused mainly on 1st d AD&D and Marvel. Ran a "Days of Future Past" campaign based loosely on some module TSR had put out. But we used original characters. We never used the pre-gen heroes except as NPCS of note. We also did some Star Wars gaming back then, and some Robotech, TMNT and the Mechwarrior RPG.

In college, I ran a Shadowrun campaign, and prior to that, a 2nd ed AD&D campaign set in Greyhawk. Both were pretty fun. Didn't really have a problem with min/maxers in the SR game. This was mainly because, at the time, no one really knew what to make of the setting. it was always an odd fit for folks who came straight from AD&D half their lives.

As a result, they didn't really know how to tweak the rules to generate superbadassmofos. And with the damage system, a bullet could still cack the toughest troll Sam.

I did have some twinks in my AD&D game. But it was easy to keep them in line with such things as a murder investigation from the local constabulary (they were ALWAYS in the wrong place at just the right time), and a treasure that carried a geas. Greedy dogs. Messed around with Ravenloft and Spelljammer for a bit. But that never really took off.

After that, I briefly ran a Vampire: The Masquerade game that ended up being pretty cool. Was running that with a bunch of guys who had just gotten back from the first Gulf War. Predictably perhaps, they all played soldiers...

I got out of gaming at that point for a long while. Drugs were pretty fun, as it turned out. Some friends at work got really excited about Mage and Trinity/Aeon, so we tried that out. Mage was not entirely unlike Shadowrun for me, because it was very difficult for me to get a grasp on the character concepts. Magic was supposed to be very low key, so I didn't see much fun in playing most of the character concepts we came up with.

Got a handle on it after a while and I started running a Mage game myself. When my campaign came to an end and someone else began running the game, he decided to open it to the entire World of Darkness setting. I was burnt out on playing Mages and arguing and shit, so I played a weretiger.

It was like running a 20th level fighter amidst a gaggle of 3rd level wizards and thieves. And that's just the way the rules worked. I dunno how the ST balanced that shit out in his mind. But everytime I asked if this was fair or if that was balanced, he'd say, "That's how it's supposed to work. Do it."

it was like running a hong kong action movie, and was the most fun I've had in a game in years.

Then, we turned to Aberrant, which was a superhero (sorta) prequel to the futuristic Trinity. In 30 years or so, these superhero characters would go mad with power and become the primary villains in the trinity setting.

basically.

That was fun for a while, but gamer ridiculopathy rapidly disintegrated my interest. Plus, the gaming group suffered a pretty big rift. I ran a very small Star Trek game for a while, and that was fun: mirror universes and sexy Borg bitches. But the company producing the game tanked before they could release most of their sourcebooks. Another company picked up the license from Paramount, but the rules set was ate-up-with-a-dumb-ass. And then, they tanked. Again, before they could release more than a few books.

So, i didn't play Aberrant again until a couple years later, this time online. After that, Mutants and Masterminds, which was a much more generic, user-friendly superhero setting. far more versatile game. Also online. But that's when I got out of gaming this last time.

I had a lot of plans for M&M; I began making my own setting. The company that designed the game had a "Superlink" project, where users could actually publish material under the license. So, I planned on releasing my own setting sourcebook for the game, but life, as they say, got in the way of publishing.

But when I create a setting and an entire world of characters (some of which you'll see in that link above), I can't just let go of those ideas.

They're still bouncing around inside my head, changing and developing and so forth. I sorta figured I might try eventually to write a novel about these characters, but was always dismayed by the almost total lack of interest in superhero novels that weren't named "Wild Cards".

But with the release of books like "Soon I Will Be Invicible" and "Devil's Cape" (both of which I highly muthafuckin recommend), I'm thinking the idea might not be so bad. But nowadays, I'm still trying to figure out how to make my setting and characters stand out from those of every other guy with the idea to do the same.

So, like i said, a lot of my free time now is devoted to character design (through illustration) and trying to make the setting stand out somehow.

Sorry for the long-winded reply.

Very cool. Was the first Trek game from Last Unicorn? I was on their usergroup til they folded. Never did get a game going since my friends were kind of not into the Trek universe. Did have a great time shooting the breeze and thinking up concepts in that mailing list though. Too bad they lost the license.

Read most of the systems you mentioned, except weirdly WoD stuff and M&M. I was always meaning to get into M&M but for a while the main sourcebook was hard to find and then I got into other things. It's too bad about the D20 system, but looks like they will continue to support it under the 3rd Era label.

sdsichero wrote:Very cool. Was the first Trek game from Last Unicorn? I was on their usergroup til they folded. Never did get a game going since my friends were kind of not into the Trek universe. Did have a great time shooting the breeze and thinking up concepts in that mailing list though. Too bad they lost the license.

Read most of the systems you mentioned, except weirdly WoD stuff and M&M. I was always meaning to get into M&M but for a while the main sourcebook was hard to find and then I got into other things. It's too bad about the D20 system, but looks like they will continue to support it under the 3rd Era label.

The first trek game I played was FASA, but the one I mentioned above was Last Unicorn Games.

I highly recommend checking out Mutants and Masterminds. 1st edition was very elegant, combining the best of TSR's Marvel, and Mayfair's DC Heroes (2nd ed). It could model any power set from the Silver Surfer to Batman. It bore little resemblance to D20, whcih, for me, was a plus. You might be able to find copies on Amazon or ebay. I'm not up on the current edition's rules, but if you go to their online store You can order hard copies of the corebooks or PDFs of them.

I remember when White Wolf decided to go D20 with Aberrant, switching over from the Storyteller System, and I set about adapting M&M to run Aberrants. It was something that could have been accomplished in a day. Rather than buy a D20 rulebook that had the exact same content as my old Aberrant corebook, I was like, why not use the M&M rules set which works more fluidly than either Storyteller or D20, and which I already own?

People did all sorts of conversions for M&M, even adapting it to run Star Wars and Highlander and all sorts of stuff. Over at their message boards, there are even folks talking about adapting it for a Trek game for the new movie. Don't know how that'll work out, but it's a solid system.

"You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,And now and then stab, as occasion serves."

I messed around with some of these games during my first year or so of collage.
The main one we stuck with for most of that time was the westend Star Wars game.
It had a nice simple system.
I was the GM for those games and it worked out pretty well.
Looking back the best bit was towards the end when one of the players killed another player.
Even though we never took to seriously things got a little tense between the two guys for a few days.
I've still got all those books I bought in a box ready to go up on ebay one of these days.

Last edited by Derm on Wed Dec 31, 2008 11:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Derm wrote:I messed around with some of these games during my first year or so of collage.The main one we stuck with for most of that time was the westend Star Wars game.It had a nice simple system.I was the GM for those games and it worked out pretty well.Looking back the best bit was towards the end when one of the players killed another player.Even though we never took to seriously things got a little tense between the two guys for a few days.I've still got all those books I bought in a box ready to go up on one of these days.

I had dug them out earlier this year looking for reference pics for something or the other.

"You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,And now and then stab, as occasion serves."

Strict31 wrote:I highly recommend checking out Mutants and Masterminds. 1st edition was very elegant, combining the best of TSR's Marvel, and Mayfair's DC Heroes (2nd ed). It could model any power set from the Silver Surfer to Batman. It bore little resemblance to D20, whcih, for me, was a plus. You might be able to find copies on Amazon or ebay. I'm not up on the current edition's rules, but if you go to their online store You can order hard copies of the corebooks or PDFs of them.

It was D20, but only really on the surface. It replaced Hit Points with a damage save that really worked well to capture the feel of a comic book superhero battle. Replaced levels with "power levels', which weren't a measure of experience at all, but rather comparative ability. For each Power level, you were assigned 15 points to assign to attributes or powers. So, by setting an average of PL 10 for most characters, you had 150 points with which to build a character. You could easily build both Batman and Superman at PL10. As long as they both are built on the same amount of points, their abilities may vary, but their relative capability won't.

Power Level was kinda like a threat level; it gives you a sense of what foes and challenges your character can handle easily, which ones he can handle with difficulty, and which one are likely to whup his ever-lovin' ass.

In this manner, you could easily build teams of widely varied characters, from super powerhouses who can zoom through space, to grim-n-gritty pugilists who bitch-slap crime with the back of their pimpgloves. And they can be balanced out.

That was one of the big problems with Marvel SuperHeroes; look at the capabilities of, say Cyclops and Colossus, there's no way Cyclops can really keep up with the big shiny. I mean, one hit, and it's over for Cyke.

But if both characters were constructed in M&M, you'd have a game that flowed more like the comics.

They still had the fort, will and ref saves; they still had feats (though some of the shared feats worked differently than in other D20 games). There were no classes or anything like that. The Attributes functioned largely the same, but could be supplemented with super-attributes, which expanded attribute capabilities to (obviously) superhuman levels. There were even superhuman versions of skills.

Powers each had a rank, which is a number that cannot exceed your PL. So, if you're running a PL15 character, you can't have any power that is higher than 15 ranks.

They were constructed of component "Effects". Such as a Movement Effect, or an Attack Effect. Each effect was purchased with points. Say you wanna build a flight power that surrounds you with a fiery aura that can harm anyone coming close: you buy a movement effect and slave an attack effect to it.

There are bonuses and flaws available for powers. Say you wanna build a guy with claws. You buy an attack effect and take the flaw, no range. That flaw gives you extra points to purchase other things, such as an indestructible bonus. Now, you've got adamantium claws.

Each power can have a different source. Say, magical, like Shazam; Cosmic, like Silver Surfer, technological, like iron Man, Training, like Batman, and so on. In this way, you can give batman a couple of Superskills, like acrobatics or Investigation, and slap a training source on them to explain how he can keep up with guys like Spider-Man or Taskmaster or whoever.

very simple, very quick, very clean.

it takes D20, throws away the parts that are too crunchy and numbers-driven, and leaves you with a lean system that is perfect for literally replicating splash pages from comics.

Even the device building rules followed the same basic principle, allowing you to build any gear-guy from iron man to that Scalphunter dude from the marauders, who can literally build any sort of weapon on the fly.

Plus, they had an optional rule called Dramatic Editing or something similar, which borrowed very heavily from White Wolf's Adventure! game. This worked a little bit like Karma in MSH, allowing you to alter failed dice rolls on the fly or augment them, if you really need a dramatic success (say, grabbing an infant while both of you are falling, and swinging on a flagpole to safety just in the nick of time). Or you could use it to push your strength or speed, like when Superman has to lift more than he's ever lifted before, or fly faster than he's ever flown before.

The GM governed uses of Dramatic Editing very closely. You couldn't just do it all the time. But even villain NPCs could use it to escape from "certain death" as they are wont to do at times.

I don't know how much was changed in 2nd ed, because I was out of gaming by the time that was released. But a lot of people on the boards really seem to like it. These days, I don't much keep up with the rules changes and what-not, so I'm not sure how much impact 4th ed D&D will have on M&M through the Open Source licensing.

But if you can find the 1st ed rules in a bargain bin, it's a totally serviceable product, with a good deal of supplement material still around for it. Even more supplement material for 2nd ed, but the overwhelming majority of it is totally optional.

"You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,And now and then stab, as occasion serves."

I've played RPGs for some 30 years. We started with the Blue Box D&D, games run by my brother. Then we had an AD&D campaign for a while. Then he went to college, and I took over as GM of my own groups. The longest setting I ran was one based on the TSR Marvel Heroes game, converted over to Hero/Champions, then converted again to Heroes Unlimited. That led to a long campaign using RIFTS. On the side, we had a Robotech campaign.

One of the best RPG adventure products I ever ran was Operation Rimfire for Mekton. They really captured the feel of an anime series with that, total success.

I haven't had much luck getting groups going over the past 10 years, though. I had a decent AD&D setting all worked up, but my girlfriend at the time had jealousy issues with an ex in the group, and that died. We tried another RIFTS setting using converted d20 rules, but the group was too large. Mostly these days I just get the odd RPG book to read and keep up on what the latest good ideas are.

I really like the way Mutants and Masterminds takes hit points out of the d20 system. I also like the systems used in the original Deadlands/Hell on Earth system, and the CODA rules used for Decipher's Lord of the Rings game are nice. I've always been a fan of the WFRP career system, so much that I think about getting the new WFRP book just to have it for reference.

If I had the time, I'd get a fantasy group together, probably using D&D 3X rules put out by Paizo. I really like their adventure path idea, and if we win the lottery, I'm going to subscribe.

I'm running the Paizo Savage Tide adventure path. Its a bit of a railroad but its fun due to who you end up interacting with. If I was just running seperate adventures I'd probably have already dropped D20 D&D.